Wendy W. Williams, a strong legal advocate the gender equality, wrote in The Equality Crisis: Some Reflections on Culture, Courts, and Feminism,
"[F]eminists who seek special recognition for pregnancy are starting from the same basic assumption, namely, that women have a special place in the scheme of human existence when it comes to maternity. . . . The special treatment model has great costs. . . . [T]he reality [is] that conceptualizing pregnancy as a special case permits unfavorable as well as favorable treatment of pregnancy. Our history provides too many illustrations of the former. . . ."
We used this quote yesterday to generate discussion on the matter of pregnancy in the workplace, the Equal Pay Act, the Pregnancy Disability Act, and how this all plays into feminists' efforts to close the gender gap. Williams represents one camp that feels any special treatment of women, pregnant or otherwise, results in further contribution to the harmful female stereotype. At first, I was a little outraged at her sentiments; I thought, "Surely, she doesn't expect women to give birth one day and return to work the next." Personally, I firmly believe women can be feminine, maternal, and feminist and I think Williams does, too. This is just an excerpt that slightly skews her intended message.
All too often, onlookers believe feminists equate equality with becoming like a man. In my Law and Gender class, we brought up Hollywood's fad surrogacy practice–Nicole Kidman and Sarah Jessica Parker recently welcomed biological children incubated in a surrogate mother. My professor's comment was, "That makes the women like the men." And it's comments like these that tend to communicate a mistaken message that the goal of the feminist movement is to be a man or like a man. Unfortunately, rather than helping the feminist movement, this threatens to play into the superior, dominant masculine fallacy. And if this was what the feminist movement was truly seeking, we'd have a problem, but I don't honestly think feminists are saying they want women to be like men. What they mean to communicate is a desire to attain the same status as men, but in doing such, we are forced to reconcile distinctly feminine roles, such as pregnancy, and workplace and societal roles.
Current legislation, such as the Pregnancy Disability Act (PDA), despite its name, treats pregnancy like any other disability, thus allowing women to take necessary medical leave without fear of losing her job. As far as the employer is concerned, the difference is not pregnant and non-pregnant employees, but disabled and non-disabled employees. That latter classification completely removes any gender classification, thus eliminating the "unfavorable" costs to which Williams refers. Now before you people get your panties in a bunch, I'm not saying it's at all nice to call pregnancy a disability; it's not a disability. It's a great joy, a miracle, and one the most amazing experiences of my life, but that doesn't change the fact that pregnancy comes with some disabling symptoms: vomiting, nausea, bloating, constipation, a beach ball-sized belly, frequent urination, child birth, contractions, and miserable, miserable back and pelvic pain, just to name a few. And for the sake of keeping things gender-neutral, it seems less-harmful to refer to pregnancy as a disability, at least for legislative purposes, rather than create a special pregnancy provision that would, as Williams argues, come at great cost to women.
Too often people see special pregnancy policies as a means of promoting lesser qualified women and giving women special privileges as opposed to what it really is, medical leave. Now I realize this is really just a semantics argument, but in this case, "maternity leave" and "medical leave" carry two distinct sets of stereotypes/ideas/stigmas. "Maternity leave" conjures images of a woman sweating and screaming in a hospital bed and then later cuddling with a cooing infant and folding tiny onesies. "Medical leave," on the other hand, at least in my mind, brings about a much more gender neutral image involving surgery or some medical procedure and much-needed post-procedure rest and recovery. The latter is much more favorable to the feminist movement in that it works to detach feminine stereotypes.
And now, before I lose the attention of my audience, I'm going to end this post here, to be continued at some later date (I know; kind of an awkward place to end, but I'm getting ready to hop on a bus to the airport to get on a plane that will take us back to sunny Florida for a few days–yay!). Gender issues are a personal favorite and they will certainly be a frequent topic of future blog posts. My hope for these posts, and all others for that matter, is that they will generate discussion and inspire my readers to think in more depth about these issues.
